Nikon’s D300S isn’t exactly tailor made for D300 owners, but for those waiting patiently to jump into the semi-pro DSLR game, it offers up a pretty delightful array of specs. Boasting SD and CF slots, a 720p movie mode and 12.3 megapixels of sharp shooting goodness, this here cam received overwhelmingly positive reviews late last year. Strategically positioned between the full-frame D700 and the lesser-specced D90, we’re sure the D300S found its way into quite a few hearts (and under quite a few trees) between then and now. If you’ve been firing off snaps with one of these for a few months now, we’re curious to know how you’d tweak things if the power were yours. Does the “S” really add enough to the D300 package to warrant the boost in price? How’s the image quality? Is the video mode a-okay for your purposes? Spill your heart out in comments below — we’re here to hold your hand if necessary.
Most people know which brand of camera went to (and stayed on) the Moon: Hasselblad. Those old medium-format cameras could stand up to the extremes of heat and cold, were insanely reliable due to being both solidly built and manual, and as we know, they took great pictures.
But what does NASA use now for its space cameras? Nikons, as it turns out. The agency just ordered 11 shiny-new Nikon D3s DSLRs, along with AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lenses, to be used on board the International Space Station. We imagine that the ultra-wide zoom is essential in such cramped quarters.
These cameras are, says Nikon, completely stock, just like you or I could buy in the store. They’re not the first Nikons in space, either: the company has been supplying NASA with camera from as long ago as 1971, and right now there are around 35 lenses and six D2XS cameras already aboard the ISS. In total, NASA has taken around 700,000 photos with Nikon kit, and now everything is digital we expect the numbers to, ahem, skyrocket.
Nine years ago, as a young tech reporter at Time Magazine, I co-wrote a buyer’s guide with the latest and greatest gear known to man. Today, it sounds ridiculous.
• Creative’s $500 Nomad Jukebox (pictured above), was not only “sleek”—at least when compared to a CD Walkman—but “can hold as much music as 150 CDs.”
• The Extiva was a $350 DVD player from Samsung with the Nuon chip, so “you can also play videogames.” Not sure which videogames we were referring to there.
• Our pick for digital camera was Nikon’s twisty CoolPix 990, 3 million pixels for 1 thousand dollars.
• Gateway laptop with 12.1-in. display, 550MHz chip and a year of free AOL was “a great deal” at $1300.
• Two-way pagers from Motorola, $180 each, let you send messages back and forth, and came in “four hot colors.”
• LG’s Touchpoint 3000 smartish phone cost $400, combined an address book and an organizer, and had one killer app: “Tap someone’s name, and it dials for you.”
• The $300 Iomega HipZip took little PocketZip magnetic disks instead of flash memory so it was easier to “get with the MP3 revolution”—hooray for obscure proprietary formats that died within a year!
• Cybiko was invented a decade ago but promised to do almost more than what the Peek does today—with wireless messaging and an MP3 “attachment.”
• “It’s near impossible to find this killer game console—and just as hard to find good titles to play on it.” The console? PlayStation 2.
• Handspring Visor Prism, the great hope of the PDA world, had a cartridge slot so that you could “turn it into a cellphone, an MP3 player, or a miniature digital camera.” Only trouble was when the cartridges started costing more than the $450 PDA.
The whole list is pretty hilarious—I encourage you to pop over and read more. [Time.com]
I apologize for the crappy quality of some of the images—I had to go grab promo shots found out on the web. For some reason, Time didn’t preserve our gorgeous photoshoot online. Guess they thought the internet was just a fad.
Rainn Wilson, best known for playing Dwight Schrute onThe Office, shot a 140-second film using a Nikon D5000 as part of his participation in the Nikon Film Festival. He talked with us about directing, pancakes and solar-powered deer-meat grinders.
Rainn is one of three judges in the inaugural Twitter-themed Nikon Festival, in which people submit 140-second videos in the hopes of winning a $100,000 prize. Here’s Rainn’s own video—not a contest entry, naturally—which he made using just an entry-level DSLR:
In your 140-second film, you scatter pancakes on the ground in the shape of an eye, taunt a rocking horse, and play yourself in ping-pong. Were you worried about making a film that’s such transparent Oscar-bait?
I was, I was a little bit. You know, there’s kind of a formula for winning an Oscar and I pretty much followed it to a tee. The only things I left out were someone dying of a debilitating illness and a lot of, like, tracking shots at an airport.
You’re an actor, writer and Twitterer, so it seems like this festival is a pretty good fit—but what about this particular festival most appealed to you?
One thing I’m all for, in all seriousness, is, in this age of minutia, where anyone can post their domes on their websites or on YouTube, where digital cameras take high-def video, is to democratize the filmmaking art. Instead of filmmaking being this realm of people who went to top film schools and knew the right people, now it’s open to everyone. All you need is a camera that you can buy at your local Best Buy, a good idea and some visual talent for storytelling, and you can win a real prize.
Hypothetical question: What would you say is a reasonable amount of money to slip a judge in, say, a digital short film festival, to ensure a win? Purely hypothetical, remember.
I can guarantee anyone a win for $99,000. You could walk away with $1,000. American. Just slip me 99 grand and it’s yours.
You’ve achieved pretty amazing success in the past few years, with a breakout role on a hit sitcom, the leading role in a movie, and a bunch of memorable cameos. Were you upset when MTV chose iJustine over you to be the official Twitter correspondent of the 2009 Video Music Awards?
Upset is the understatement of the century. I was devastated. My world was rocked. I have more Twitter followers, I’m better known, and I have a MUCH better body.
Your spirituality-discussion website is called SoulPancake, and pancakes are also featured in your 140-second film. What can you tell us about your relationship with pancakes?
You know, I’m trying to get over a primal wound. When I was a child, I was raped by a pancake.
My followup question was if you had any favorite pancake recipes you want to share, but now it seems like kind of a sore topic.
Yeah, very sore. But I’d have to go with the walnut-cranberry.
That’s a good one.
Pumpkin. Lemon.
So…
Caramel… Pancakes.
Your 140-second film is really well shot and fun to look at—did you direct it yourself?
I directed it in collaboration with a friend of mine, Joshua Homnick. We’ve collaborated on a bunch of things; we’re actually working on a new media project for Microsoft Zune and Xbox. [Joshua is] a great filmmaker, photographer, and editor; I couldn’t have done it without him.
Are you interested in maybe directing an episode of The Office, like Steve Carell did?
Yeah. John Krasinski directs one in the spring and supposedly I’ll be directing one pretty soon. So get ready for that. I’m gonna put Carell through his paces. I’m gonna be like, “Man, uh-uh, not good enough. Not funny enough. Try again, make me laugh. Cut! What are you thinking, Carell? Come on, magic man, show me what you got!”
Do you think Dwight would read Gizmodo? I ask because it sometimes seems like some of our commenters are channeling him.
Dwight would definitely be on Gizmodo, but he’d be the guy on the comment board who always writes “first.” He’d always be in a race to write first. He’d be “The First Guy.”
After seeing the joy that Dwight took in his Christmas present this year, a nutcracker he built himself, I’m curious: What would Dwight’s favorite gadgets be? Are any of them from this century?
That’s an excellent question. I think Dwight would enjoy updating industrial gadgets from the last century for the modern world. For instance, he might have, like, a deer sausage grinder, but solar powered.
Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today’s bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season.
Digital cameras are the bread-and-butter of holiday gadget giving — everyone wants one, and everyone wants a better one. But you can’t just dole out any shooter you can find — you need to find the right balance of image quality, features, and usability for your intended recipient, and hold the line on your bank account as well. Sounds daunting, but we’ve pulled up a few of the more interesting models out there to help you out.
You want short depth of field? Can’t be bothered to walk closer to your subject? Need to work on those weedy biceps? Hands shaking from a little too much of the good stuff last night? Nikon has you covered, with its new 6.4-pound, 300mm ƒ2.8 monster, a lens which packs in just about every new technology that Nikon has cooked up in the past few years.
Despite the weight, the lens is not that huge, and amazingly has just a 52mm filter thread. Inside you have a Silent Wave motor so the camera doesn’t have to shift the elements into focus and a VRII shake-reducer which adds up to four stops worth of wobble control (and has an auto-detecting tripod mode which optimizes the anti-shake for non-handheld shooting).
There is also a rather odd but possibly very useful feature: AF Memory Recall, which despite its name is not for remembering to take sharp pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger on Mars. Instead, it lets you flip instantly back to a pre-determined point of focus. We’d like to see this on some shorter lenses, too — it would be dead handy for popping to the hyper-focal distance of a lens for fast street-shooting, for example.
Otherwise, there is a range of coatings on the elements, from ED to Nano Crystal to SIC. These all help the light get through to the sensor quickly and cleanly.
The price? This is a pro level lens, and has a pro-level price of $5,900. Nikon also has a 2x teleconverter out today, with an aspherical element which is a world first in converters. That will be going for an equally painful $500.
Previous reviews haven’t been all smiles, but we’re finally able to pick up Nikon’s Coolpix S70 and see for ourselves. On form factor alone, it’s a pretty alluring build — even the faux leather front is tastefully done. While the tap-to-focus feature is a nice addition, we’re less enthused about the OLED screen’s viewing angles when outside — and seeing as we’ve go no other way to see the memories we’re framing, that’s pretty disappointing. We’re still putting it through its paces before we dole out full impressions, but in the meantime, enjoy our unboxing and hands-on photos.
We’ll admit we save our Nikon excitement for the sort of gear that comes with “bad mother” stitched into its casing, but sometimes even our jaded souls can get intrigued by a compact. This particular slimline unit has an OLED touchscreen display, with the additional inclusion of multitouch and gesture support, which already gets it right up to speed on the latest trends. With a 5x optical zoom, 12 megapixel sensor, and 720p/30fps video, it’s also no slouch on the spec sheet, but reviewers at Photography Blog found a few shortcomings. The Nikon S70 is said to be overly reliant on the 3.5-inch touch display for controls, and although the camera is both thin and ultrafast to start up, those benefits come at the greatest cost of all: image quality is only average, and noise handling is poor even at base ISO. We’ll file this one in our “vivacious but vapid” archive while you busy yourself with reading the full review.
We’re not going to chalk this one up to Japanese culture, the child rearing techniques of show-biz-addled parents, or the craze-inducing effects that come from the integration of a pico projector within a digital camera — this video is too big to have such trite little lines drawn around it. Basically it answers the age-old question of what would happen if you strapped a couple dozen Nikon Coolpix S1000pj cameras to two excitable children and had them work through an incredibly awkward choreography in front of hundreds of their astonished peers. Video is after the break.
Our Black Friday just got significantly more awesome — a new Nikon D3S showed up on our doorstep a moment ago, along with a super-hot NIKKOR AF-S 24-70 f/2.8G ED lens. We’re just about to dive into this thing’s incredible ISO 102,400 performance (well, we will when it get a little darker) and full-manual 720p24 video mode, but for now we thought we’d hit you up with some unboxing shots — check ’em out!
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
